Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Lonely Heiress

“Hello, Della. Gone to bed yet?”

“No. I’ve only been here a few minutes. What’s happened?”

Mason said, “I ran into something.”

“At Caddo’s?”

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“I think I do. How tired are you?”

“Not at all. I’ll wait.”

“I’ll be right out,” Mason promised.

He jumped into his car, made time through the night streets to Della’s apartment.

She had left the door slightly ajar so he could enter without knocking.

“Hello,” she said. “What do you want, Scotch and soda or coffee? I have them both.”

“Coffee,” Mason said. “I just had a drink.”

She poured him a big cup of coffee, added cream and sugar, brought out crackers and a plate of assorted tea biscuits.

Mason seated himself at the table, sipped the coffee gratefully, munched on tea biscuits, and said nothing.

She sat quietly across the table from him, refilling his coffee cup when it was half empty, waiting for him to think his way through the situation which confronted him.

At length Mason pushed the plate of tea biscuits away from him and took out his cigarette case. He held a pocket lighter for their cigarettes, then settled back in the chair and said, “I went to Caddo’s place. Caddo was a very much subdued individual. His wife admitted she’d been out to take Rose Keeling apart. She arrived about eleven-thirty, she says. That’s apparently approximate. She made a scene, tore Rose Keeling’s sunsuit, threw some fountain pen ink just as Rose Keeling made a dash for the bathroom to keep from being spanked. Rose slammed the bathroom door and locked it. Mrs. Caddo went out.”

“Chief!” Della Street exclaimed, her eyes big. “That accounts for it. That takes Marilyn Marlow off the spot.”

“Wait a minute,” Mason said. “Get the rest of it. I called Lieutenant Tragg. He came out there in a rush. I told him my story. Mrs. Caddo was just as sweet as honey on hot cakes. She told Tragg she’d never said any such thing. Caddo blinked, and backed her play. He said he’d been present during every minute of the conversation. He said nothing like that had been said; he thought perhaps I was trying to work some clumsy, amateurish third-degree on his wife.”

“What did Tragg do?”

“When I left they were buying Tragg a drink. Everybody was chummy and hotsy-totsy.”

“Can Tragg be that dumb?”

“It’s not that he’s so dumb. He’s completely hypnotized with the idea that Marilyn Marlow is the one he’s after. He can’t see any angle that doesn’t make Marilyn it. He’s found some new evidence. He says he’s found the murder weapon in Marilyn’s possession.”

Della Street’s face showed startled dismay.

“So,” Mason went on, “I guess our habeas corpus didn’t do much good. They’ll charge her now.”

“Chief!” Della exclaimed, “how could they have found — oh, Lord!”

Mason nodded glumly.

After a minute or two, Della Street said, “But why did Mrs. Caddo tell you that she’d been out there if she was going to lie later?”

“She may be smart. It may have been because she didn’t know Rose was dead until I told her. I spilled it because I thought she must know it. In other words, I’d pick her as the one who did it. She may have decided that a play like that was the best way to convince me that even if she had been out there, she had nothing to do with the killing. She may be really smart, that Caddo woman.”

“What’s going to happen now?” Della Street asked.

Mason said, “If we let events take their natural course, about ten or eleven o’clock in the morning Tragg will call at my office. He’ll say in effect, ‘Mr. Mason, you have Marilyn Marlow concealed somewhere. You know where she is. She’s charged with first-degree murder. I have here a warrant for her arrest. I want her. I’m calling on you to produce her. If you continue to conceal her, so help me, I’ll name you as an accessory and drag you in too.’ ”

“What can we do to stop that?”

“Nothing — once it happens. A murder warrant will have me on a spot.”

“Then between now and morning you have to think of some way of heading off Lieutenant Tragg?”

He nodded.

She smiled, reached across the table, put her hand over his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I take it,” she said, “you’re about to hatch up some skulduggery.”

“We’ve got to find a red herring somewhere.”

“Where?” Della Street asked.

Mason grinned and said, “That, my dear young lady, is the object of the meeting.”

She quietly got up from the chair, went to the kitchen, brought back the coffee pot and refilled Mason’s cup. Then she filled her own.

She returned the coffee to the stove, raised the rim of her cup as though proposing a toast to the lawyer, and said, “Here’s good-by to sleep.”

“Good-by to sleep,” Mason said, and touched coffee cups, and then again they sipped their coffee and smoked cigarettes.

An alarm clock that was somewhere in the kitchen, ticking away the seconds, began to sound increasingly audible in the night silence which wrapped the apartment house.

Mason said thoughtfully, “We have to get some new evidence which will incriminate someone else.”

“How about putting a different interpretation on some of the evidence that Tragg already has?” Della Street asked.

“I’m turning that one over in my mind,” Mason told her. “It would be a slick stunt if we could figure some way of doing it. Nice business if you could only get it!”

Mason’s thumb and forefinger slid down into his right-hand vest pocket, brought out a key, started tapping on the table with the key.

“What’s that?” Della Street asked.

“That,” Mason said, “is the key that Rose Keeling gave Marilyn Marlow, the key that enabled her to open the door and get into Rose Keeling’s apartment, the key she left on the table and the key I picked up and put in my pocket.”

“Oh, oh,” Della Street said.

“Are you reading my mind?” Mason asked.

She said, “I’m two paragraphs ahead of you.”

Mason said, “The big trouble with the case, as far as we are concerned, is that no one has a motive for killing Rose Keeling except Marilyn Marlow. The Endicotts are pure as the driven snow. Quite apparently it was to their interest to have Rose Keeling live. The very thing that gives Marilyn a motive gives Ralph Endicott a clean bill of health.”

“Plus an alibi, of course,” Della Street said dryly.

Mason nodded thoughtfully.

“And with Mrs. Caddo,” Mason said, “we have a peculiar situation: A jealous wife going out to raise the devil with a woman who she thought had been philandering with her husband. Her husband probably went tearing after her, trying to explain that, after all, it was merely a business proposition, that he was trying to cut himself a piece of cake by horning in on a will contest. Probably of all the alibis Robert Caddo ever had, this was the only one that he stood any chance of putting over. As soon as he could find his wife, he could convince her that she had better lay off. Now, according to the way events developed, he must have found her after she saw Rose Keeling and before she called on Marilyn Marlow. Otherwise, Marilyn Marlow would have had some ink stains and perhaps a few facial blemishes to add to her other troubles.”

“Stay with it,” Della Street said, smiling. “You’re doing fine.”

“And then,” Mason went on, “we run up against the fact there’s no motive for anyone to have committed the murder, other than Marilyn Marlow.”

“And,” Della Street said, “by a rare coincidence, we have the key to Rose Keeling’s flat. Is that the sequence of ideas you’re seeking to impress upon my mind?”